For the longest time, I had this draft titled “Battle for your Fn key” in my Substack folder, and I didn’t get around to writing it. This week’s events gave me a perfect reason to get back to it.
Here’s what happened: Granola, the company known for meeting notetaking, released dictation. In August, Wispr, the company known for dictation, launched a meeting notetaker.
There are plenty of apps in the voice world that have released competing features this year, and we will talk about that. But something strange and funny happened because both Granola and Wispr apps used to live in different worlds.
Because Wispr was the dictation app, people used to use the Fn key to make it work. After Granola’s new dictation feature, that functionality clashed, and people started seeing double dictation because both apps worked simultaneously.
After this rollout from Granola, Wispr started sending emails to users to inform them to turn off voice typing in Granola to avoid double dictation.
However, you can still map different keys and try out dictation features from both apps, but typically the Fn key is used as the dictation key across apps. But with so only so many voice-related features to explore, we will see productivity apps fighting for the same surfaces.
This cross-pollination of features across apps felt like both Wispr and Granola’s worlds are colliding. They aren’t the only apps putting eggs in multiple voice-based feature baskets. Fireflies, Monologue, and Speechify have worked on both meeting- and dictation-related features.
On the consumer end, there is only so much voice to capture. People speaking to their computers to send prompts to AI assistants and replying to emails and messages is one surface, and them talking to other people during meetings is another. Yes, there is an area of listening to users ambiently all the time to give personal and professional insights, but that’s arguably tricky to navigate with privacy and regulatory risks.
There are so many dictation apps now that I can link each word of the sentence with a new one. Building them is easy with vibe coding, but scaling them is difficult. Wispr has scaled its app to facilitate 100 billion transcribed words. Other apps might take a bit of time to get there with their user base. Basic dictation might even be free in the future, with apps like Willow and Fireflies making those moves.
Similarly, getting people to stick with a meeting notetaker is a tough job, given that there are so many options out there.
For enterprises, it’s a different deal as they tend to commit for a long time. And maybe that’s the slant for these voice apps. These startups have identified a few emerging areas of voice where users want their voice to be captured or transcribed.
Productivity is such an area that always a lot of apps will exist and new ones would be launched. However, the top players with top valuations need to prove their worth beyond basic existence and core features working well. They need scale, stickiness, big enterprise contracts, and a promise of a future.
For the likes of Granola, Fireflies, Plaud, and Wispr, those paths look similar with different flavours. Apart from Plaud, none of the other companies have dedicated hardware, so they would, as expected, move into that area through partnerships to manufacture hardware themselves.
Another area they will concentrate on is automation of work, whether that takes place in an assistant form that schedules meetings and answers emails or in the form of task automation by connecting with other enterprise tools and using meeting transcripts to form action items that spur them.
Most enterprise contracts are not finalized on X, but the attention of an average consumer choosing one app over another may start there. Dictation and meeting notetaking are two big use cases of voice AI. More people are discovering those use cases for the first time. If an app grabs their attention and they like the product, the user can adopt that product for the company they work for, and this is where feature launches become important.